HD3D

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In a nondescript optics lab in tucked into an anonymous office park in a
suburb of Los Angeles, the photon hackers of Deep Light are showing off the
future of media. The object of their affection is a small screen on which an
animated gladiator is clashing scimitars with a horned monster in a
Coliseum-like setting.

But this is not a flat cartoon image; it is full three-dimensional space,
the combatants convincingly circling each other inches from the viewer's
eyes, and without need for those clunky red-and-blue cardboard glasses,
either. It is a 3-D image seen with the naked eye. The host, Dan Mapes, Deep
Light's co-founder, bounces on his heels, giggling with delight: "It's cool,
isn't it?"

Indeed. Ordinary TV sets deliver 500 lines of resolution. Most
high-definition screens reach 1,050. The HD3D hits 1,280 lines and counting,
meaning better picture quality than that of any TV available today, all in a
convincing impression of the third dimension. And here's the seriously
mind-bending part about the new screen, which Deep Light plans to introduce
at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January: One screen can
show different programs to different viewers at the same time.

Imagine what that could do to the living room. A child sprawls on the floor,
happily splattering the virtual walls of Quake 3-D, while one parent sits on
the couch watching the news and the other talks with friends in a virtual
chat room - all on the same TV, all at the same time, and all in three
dimensions. Lean a few feet to the right, and the latest report from the
floor of the stock exchange becomes a live 3-D chat with the couple who came
over to dinner the other night; lean the other way, and Junior is blasting a
zombie.

Plenty of technical and financial hurdles remain between today's 3-D
pioneers and the future of their fervid imaginations. But Mapes contends
that Deep Light has a pretty big trend on its side: humanity's evolution
toward ever-more sophisticated representations of reality. "The brain is a
media junkie," he said, "and it wants the good stuff."

The ever-evolving high-tech revolution is finally moving three-dimensional
entertainment beyond the phase of red-and-blue glasses to natural 3-D.

Sharp has sold three million 3-D cellphones in Japan since 2003 and has just
released a laptop that toggles between 2-D and 3-D views. The South Korean
government, meanwhile, recently announced an ambitious "3-D Vision 2010"
project to make stereoscopic TV the worldwide standard within five years,
and a number of companies are racing Deep Light to build the pieces of that
puzzle: in April, Toshiba announced new display technology for 3-D
television screens.

It will most likely be years, however, before anyone starts making ordinary
television shows in 3-D.

"The whole realm of TV," said Chris Chinnock, president of the market
research firm Insight Media, "is the holy grail of 3-D."

Deep Light's technology has its origins in 1986 with Adrian Travis, who was
an optics-obsessed graduate student with an idea he called time
multiplexing: passing an image through a lens and opening a shutter when it
emerged to guide the image out at a precise angle. When the eyes encounter
an image projected twice at slightly different angles, parallax creates a
3-D image in the mind.

The problem was speed. His idea was to do that for 30 images a second
through each of 10 angles. Movies need 24 frames a second to fool the brain
into seeing motion. Video needs 30. Time multiplexing needs 300, and no
device existed to deliver it, so Travis, now a professor at Cambridge
University, decided to build one.

Time multiplexing followed the course of many other high-tech eurekas: a
long, painful succession of investors nibbling away at it, until the trail
of licenses and sublicenses reached from Europe to Asia to Los Angeles and
Dan Mapes.

Mapes is a New Age-bedazzled baby boomer and high-tech savant who has been
preaching the gospel of virtual worlds since the 1960s. His eclectic résumé
ranges from designing light shows for Peter Gabriel to running online
videoconferences for the United Nations. He was in his lab in Santa Monica,
California, three years ago when a former employee then working in South
Korea called him to rave about time multiplexing. So Mapes went to a
Northrop Grumman military laboratory where Travis's latest demo box, a
50-inch giant, had been gathering dust.

What he saw, he says, changed his career plans on the spot. He and two
partners, Paul Yoon and Robert Kory, spent $2 million in investment capital
and three years gathering all the relevant patents and licenses under one
corporate umbrella to build their first HD3D.

Deep Light says that the first PC monitors with natural 3-D could be out by
early next year for around $5,000 and that HD3D television sets could be
available later in 2006 for $10,000. These prices could drop when the
technology is mass-produced.

Meanwhile, the games industry has been eager to adapt to the evolving
technology: hit titles like Halo 2 and Spider-Man are already programmed in
3-D, ready for the day when TV screens are ready to show them in all their
glory. The new Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 use standards that support 3-D.
Movies could be next.

"As the 3-D display market reaches a certain size, we think Hollywood will
be quite interested in exploiting those screens for their libraries," said
Chris Yewdall, chief executive of Dynamic Digital Depth, a 3-D technology
company in Santa Monica.

Making an accurate prediction of the future of 3-D entertainment would be
like asking the average 1920s moviegoer to anticipate "The Matrix." But when
people painted bison on the walls at Lascaux, they were using the most
advanced tools they had to depict their world as richly as possible, and
technology has been advancing ever since. The transition to 3-D might
someday look like just the next step on a path from sound to color to
interactive - and beyond.

Source : http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/07/04/business/3d.php